Visit to Sars turns social and surprising

STEELING myself to face Sars, I bumped into a web exchange about e-filing your tax. The tone of the exchange was standard – that everything from collapse to competence to corruption was all wrong – but with one redeeming feature. At least e-filing lifted you above the suckers facing hell on earth in Sars’ chaotic crush.

“Hell on earth”. Must I face that? I wavered a moment, but regrouped. My tax morass was deep; my ignorance deeper. I would walk in with hands up and white flag flying, plead guilty and find out what I owed.

And I was curious, too, never exactly saw hell on earth yet.

Driving in was hell-ish, thanks to the news channels. Ministers and DGs attacking each other as scoundrels, city leaders forgetting their work to wage turf wars…

Today, all feels piffling next to the fireman falling 23 floors. That’s an image you can’t dispel even from just hearing. And many saw it! Smokefilled lungs, hell on earth. Imploded training, imploded leadership.

Approaching Sars, news life retreats while real life flowers. The street-parking guy, in that badge of urban rank, the reflector-jacket, does an entertaining mime of “pause a moment, we’re finding a space”.

Sars is a baffling multitude of human queues and an uplifting series of human courtesies, including a marshal apologising: “Sorry baba, you aren’t meant to wait, you can go straight.”

Giving me a slip inscribed SP he gestures to a distant colleague to await me.

SP, I learn, means pregnancy, disability, or age. Vanity is revolted to know I look like I need kid-gloves, but shuts its mouth as I’m delivered to a princely chair in the most select queue around.

My pregnant neighbour greets. Niceties shift to Xhosa lineage and land occupancy, which shifts in turn to confiscation, where her views make paint peel.

She’s poetic on the fertile flowing fields of the Free State’s Afrikaners, daily reassuring our markets that food will be found. She’s rabid on how that food won’t be found when the fields become squatter camps.

If she said this on a talk show she’d be silenced in horror. If AfriForum said it there’d be hate-speech suits. She’s saying it to me plus several citizens around us. Some assent and none demur. (Mine is the only pale face in this tale, I should specify).

At 12.41 I state my case to a Sars agent, and am struck on several counts. Her impeccable conduct, total politeness combined with official reserve. Sars’ comprehensive knowledge of my earnings.

Her matter-of-fact sorting of what I thought was chaotic (I’d still be on page 1 of the e-filing manual). How when business was done she allowed herself a smile and a moment of friendly fellowship and a name – Petronella Motsamai, supplemented by the delightfully Seffrican info that I’d know Motsamai as “Walker”, one who walks a lot.

Beckett is an author and one of South Africa’s finest journalists with a keen eye and sharp wit.